The AAI’s professional development team had a busy year devoted to two networking and data literacy programs: Digging Up Data and NADAC. Digging Up Data, an early career scholar mentorship program run in collaboration with the American Society of Overseas Research (ASOR), brought together 11 graduate students and postdoctoral researchers working on public-facing digital heritage projects. The cohort spent the year under the tutelage of co-directors Melissa Cradic and Elizabeth Knott to develop their projects for lightning talks at the hybrid Digging Up Data workshop held at the 2024 ASOR Annual Meeting in Boston (Fig. 1). Participants presented an impressive and exciting array of novel approaches to archaeology, art history, and museum topics like digital tools for a provenience reliability index, pedagogical strategies for digital storytelling, creating new databases for disparate legacy collections, and capturing and standardizing newly collected excavation and survey data. We are grateful to have had such an engaged and inspiring group and are excited to see how these projects develop.
Our flagship professional development program NADAC, an NEH Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities, entered its final program year, hosting four spring workshops, a summer workshop, and three fall workshops. This year’s theme focused on tools and strategies for presenting archaeological data to diverse audiences in museum, lab, and classroom settings. The five-day summer workshop gathered 21 NADAC Scholars in Berkeley, CA, for a second year to exchange ideas, collectively problem-solve key technical issues, create communities of practice, and peer review projects (Fig. 2).
Held in late July at the Badè Museum at Pacific School of Religion (Fig. 3), the face-to-face meeting was a major highlight of the program that strengthened the NADAC network, which will continue on with future in-person meetings at the upcoming 2025 Archaeological Institute of America and Society for American Archaeology conferences. We thank our participants for their commitment, collegiality, and contributions over the past two years and are deeply grateful to NADAC Faculty for offering a set of enriching sessions and guidance.
